AMD co-founder Jerry Sanders, in 2009 was famously quoted as stating that "real men have fabs," a jibe probably targeted at the budding fab-less CPU designers of the time. Years later, AMD spun-off its silicon fabrication business, which with a substantial investment of the Abu Dhabi government through its state-owned Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), became GlobalFoundries (or GloFo in some vernacular). This company built strategic partnerships with the right players in the industry, acquisitions such as IBM's fabs, and is now at the forefront of sub-10 nm fab development. It remained one of AMD's biggest foundry partners besides TSMC and Samsung, and is manufacturing its AMD processors at a brand new facility in Upstate New York, USA.

AMD, on the other hand, doesn't regret spinning off GloFo. Speaking at Merrill Lynch Global Technology and Investment Conference, CTO Mark Papermaster said, that going fab-less has helped AMD focus on chip-design without worrying about manufacturing. Production is no longer a bottleneck for AMD, as it can now put out manufacturing contracts to a wider variety of foundry partners. Its chip-designers aren't limited by the constraints of an in-house fab, and can instead ask external fabs to optimize their nodes for their chip-designs, Papermaster said. 14 nm FinFET has added a level of standardization to the foundry industry.

28 Commentson AMD Doesn't Regret Spinning off GlobalFoundries

Joss said:You're out of your depth, so I leave it here.
I urge you to read a couple of books though, here and here, it'll clarify things for you.

no m8 he is just living in the real world instead of the ancap utopia you seem to be living in. :)
you seem to forget human nature and something small called greed.

on topic:
that might have been one of the smartest decisions AMD ever made, apple is a great example of outsourcing manufacturing. as mentioned above having both design and manufacturing abilities has its benefits but it also has its drawbacks, one of which is the size of the company which inherently makes it inflexible, or not as flexible as having just the design part. look at ARM and where it is now by purely designing an architecture and licensing it to manufacturers.

PowerPC said:Even if they could take the bus, would Intel do it? If someone invested 100.000 $ in a new Porsche, how many people like that take the bus? Yea, not many. Even if it's cheaper, better for the environment and often even gets you faster from A to B. They will never see those advantages because they are too invested in their car.

I'm not disagreeing with you, what you highlight parallels the issue I'm trying to point out. Which is "can't" is not the same thing as "can and won't." AMD is trying to portray their prior situation as the former when it clearly was in the latter.